Upgrading the hardware of the Harley Benton

You will recall that one of the first remarks upon opening the box was that the bridge looked cheap and inaccurate. I therefore removed it immediately, to replace it with a spare Gotoh Tune-o-matic bridge I had never used in the SG project it was initially meant for.

The stock bridge was not a fine piece of hardware, and all of its saddles were slotted to the same gauge.

This bridge from my spare box would do a perfect replacement.

The other thing I had noticed was that the bridge and tailpiece posts weren't flush with the surface of the carved top.

Upgrading the fretboard of the Harley Benton

Today's operation, while quite time consuming, is by far the most significant in terms of improving the overall performance of the guitar. You remember that already upon opening the box, I had noticed that the surface of the rosewood fretboard was very obivously not up to standard:

The rosewood looks very raw, and the frets look very tarnished as well.

It did look pretty bad, and it felt bad too. The oxyded frets and the poorly sanded fretboard have a rasping effect on the strings whenever you try to apply vibrato or bends. As a result, these - quite essential - techniques not only become very uncomfortable and inaccurate to perform, but they also generate a lot of parasite noise as the string rasps against the raw surfaces. That, very clearly, put this guitar several leagues behind what I would call a decent instrument in terms of comfort and playability. And to be frank I had doubts whether I would be able to sort it out...

Cavity search on the Harley Benton

It is always worth having a look at the control cavities of any guitar because it's often very telling of how much care was taken to build the instrument. The cheaper the gear, the messier those normally invisible cavities can be. And that's also where it is the easiest to evaluate the quality of the timber used, because surfaces are generally roughly routed, not sanded, not painted or finished in any way. So here, based on the price point, I was expecting some sort of a disaster.

The volume and tone pots' cavity

The toggle switch cavity

And I have to say...

Close inspection of the Harley Benton out of the box

I always dread the first close inspection of anything I ordered without having seen it first. Zooming in on every little detail and finding every possible blemish is not being unfair, it's just what you would do anyway. And here I got loads to look at for my -- admittedly little -- money.

Starting with the bridge, which is spec'ed as a "Deluxe Tune-o-matic". It is a ToM alright but what is Deluxe about it I can't tell. The posts are the same simple ones you can only turn with a flat screwdriver, the chrome plating is quite gross, but most importantly the saddles look very rough and they are all slotted to the same gauge.

Even the low E (.46) doesn't sit snugly, and the high E (.10) is lost in the groove. Nothing Deluxe to me!

By the way...

Unboxing the Harley Benton

The order was placed at 3:40 on a Monday afternoon, the pack arrived on Thursday morning at 11:30, and even in the midst of the pre-Xmas madness, is only came so late because UPS mistakenly sent it to Cologne instead of Brussels at first, causing a 24 hour delay. Kudos to Thomann anyway for the quick and free shipping.

The guitar came thoroughly and neatly packaged with ample protection around it, hopefully it did not get damaged in transit. Straight out of the box, it did look very okay:

It does look almost as good as on the stock pictures.

Upgrading my bargain Harley Benton from Thomann

I have had a number of guitars over the years. It is fair to say I have plenty of them now. I remember some of the first Chinese mass produced pieces of junk I've had, twenty years ago. They were really terrible, and there are still plenty of those out there. I got rid of one just last week (and it was actually a recent one, from 2014, and of a brand owned by none other than the big G...). Total waste of trees.

Yet more and more often I've been coming across quite good reviews of white label Chinese guitars. In particular Thomann's latest run of their EOM branded single cuts seemed to stand out of the lot. And they do really look pretty on the pictures! Especially the Harley Benton SC-450Plus VB Vintage Series which comes the closest to my all-time favourite and fancy, the Desert Burst Les Paul Traditional.

That's the real stuff by Gibson.

And that's the Harley Benton's stock picture from the Thomann website.

What the hell, I thought...